SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket after launching it to space, December 21, 2015.
![“NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently captured a unique view of Earth from the spacecraft’s vantage point in orbit around the moon.
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In this composite image we see Earth appear to rise over the lunar horizon from the viewpoint of the...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/dfb4eea14991b10fab0a52eadb6a6c5f/tumblr_nznuwgp0At1t8pecvo1_1280.jpg)
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently captured a unique view of Earth from the spacecraft’s vantage point in orbit around the moon.
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In this composite image we see Earth appear to rise over the lunar horizon from the viewpoint of the spacecraft, with the center of the Earth just off the coast of Liberia (at 4.04 degrees North, 12.44 degrees West). The large tan area in the upper right is the Sahara Desert, and just beyond is Saudi Arabia. The Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America are visible to the left. On the moon, we get a glimpse of the crater Compton, which is located just beyond the eastern limb of the moon, on the lunar farside.
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Equipped with a BGO calorimeter, a silicon-Tungsten Tracker, a neutron detector, and a plastic scintillator detector, DAMPE is seeking to capture high energy particles and trace them back to their origin, which the project’s scientists believe to be dark matter collisions. Each scintillator is made of a material that flashes when it is struck by the ionizing radiation from a high energy particle, allowing scientists to determine the particle’s energy levels and direction of origin. Taken as a whole, the stack of scintillators which comprises DAMPE is the most sensitive detection mechanism ever sent to space.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will return to flight Sunday evening, in a mission for communications firm Orbcomm which may also see the first attempt to return the vehicle’s first stage to the launch site. Flying in a new “Full Thrust” configuration, the rocket is expected to depart Cape Canaveral at 20:29 Eastern time (01:29 UTC on Monday).
Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a tiny star with a giant, cloudy storm, using data from NASA’s Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes. The dark storm is akin to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: a persistent, raging storm larger than Earth.
“The star is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark. “We know this newfound storm has lasted at least two years, and probably longer.” Gizis is the lead author of a new study appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.
“WE’RE ON OUR WAY, HOUSTON” – On December 13, 1972, humanity left the Moon for the last time. Apollo 17 astronauts Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan ascended from the lunar surface to rendezvous with the orbiting command module and begin the journey home.
![“JAXA held a press briefing today to confirm the successful arrival of Akatsuki into Venus orbit – an even lower orbit than they’d hoped to achieve.
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Akatsuki’s ultraviolet imager (UVI) sees shorter-wavelength ultraviolet than any other previous...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/578abf9e081b93baf1d0f75db9959d65/tumblr_nz4ikoTXU91t8pecvo1_1280.png)
JAXA held a press briefing today to confirm the successful arrival of Akatsuki into Venus orbit – an even lower orbit than they’d hoped to achieve.
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Akatsuki’s ultraviolet imager (UVI) sees shorter-wavelength ultraviolet than any other previous Venus imager, at 283 nanometers. Akatsuki took this photo about 5 hours after orbit insertion (December 7, 2015, at 05:19 UT) from a distance of 72,000 kilometers.
This video shows a simulation of the space environment all the way out to Pluto in the months surrounding New Horizons’ July 2015 flyby. At the time, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, worked with the New Horizons team to test how well their models—and other models contributed by scientists around the world—predicted the space environment at Pluto. Understanding the environment through which our spacecraft travel can ultimately help protect them from radiation and other potentially damaging effects. Visualizers at Goddard recently updated the movie of the model, creating this new release, December 2015.
1970 NASA concept art shows a crew module space tug in action: “The Space Tug concept was intended to be a reusable multipurpose space vehicle designed to transport payloads to different orbital inclinations. Utilizing mission-specific combinations of its three primary modules (crew, propulsion, and cargo) and a variety of supplementary kits, the Space Tug was capable of numerous space applications.” (NASA)
Hayabusa2 used its optical navigation telephoto camera (ONC-T) to capture this view of Earth and the Moon together on November 26, 2015 at 03:46 UT, or 12:46 Japan time. The image is made of three distinct images captured through red, green, and blue filters, and has been processed to align the different-filter images with each other. North is to the left; Asia and Australia are visible on the lit face of Earth. Hayabusa2 was on the way in to its December 3, 2015 flyby of Earth.
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